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mbone writes "The 'no cost' contract between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN over hosting the Internet Assigned Names and Number Authority (IANA) was supposed to be re-let this March. Now, it has been withdrawn, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) says that 'we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community.' This is a pretty stunning vote of no confidence in ICANN by the U.S. government, on the eve of the 43rd ICANN meeting in Costa Rica. Speculation is that this is related to the attempts of the ITU-T to take over Internet governance, but it also could be over the new global top level domains. I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this in the weeks to come."

The headline is a bit misleading. What NTIA did was withdraw the RFP. The IANA contract still stays with ICANN (contract extended until the end of September), and there will likely be another RFP.

However, it is indeed a big rebuke, because in the NTIA Notice [doc.gov] they stated that " we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community" which is another way of saying that ICANN has not been acting in the global public interest.

On November 10, 2011, the Department of Commerce issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA for a new IANA functions contract with a deadline of December 19, 2011. The government may cancel any solicitation that does not meet the requirements. Accordingly, we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community. The Department intends to reissue the RFP at a future date to be determined (TBD) so that the requirements of the global internet community can be served. Interested parties are encouraged to visit www.fbo.gov for updates.

Apprently they requested some policy changes from IANA, and IANA never submitted that they had made the changes requested. The changes requested related to allowing countries to have a higher degree of latitude within their borders:

Based on the input received from stakeholders around the world, NTIA added new requirements to the IANA functions’ statement of work, including the need for structural separation of policymaking from implementation, a robust companywide conflict of interest policy, provisions reflecting heightened respect for local country laws, and a series of consultation and reporting requirements to increase transparency and accountability to the international community.

This seems reasonable, at least at this point. I suspect this is a non-issue, but worth watching.

This is the scary part for me, at least to the extent that it takes the sort of country-specific blocking that Twitter and Blogger are doing, and the sort of The Pirate Bay blocking that countries are doing, and bakes them into the requirements of doing any sort of business with a domain name on the internet.

... country-specific blocking that Twitter and Blogger are doing, and the sort of The Pirate Bay blocking that countries are doing, and bakes them into the requirements of doing any sort of business with a domain name...

Meaning local laws can decide what TLDs are allowed. They can ban ".xxx" for instance. And there is the slippery slope. A government with power to ban one domain 'name' will ban another, such as "wikileaks".

Its the "heightened respect for local country laws" that has me worried here, as i wouldn't put it past the US gov to try to backdoor some nice great firewall of USA style crap for their corporate masters. Personally i think the net is just gonna end up more and more corrupted until we have to go to a darknet just to get back what we have. We got ICANN cranking out craptastic TLDs so their registar buds can make some cash trolling the corps, we got the US gov wanting to SOPA/PIPA the net, and we have dozens of countries that all want their own little control measures in place so they can make sure they don't get Arab Springed next.

I already pimp slapped him around for a couple of posts where he wasn't even able to read properly. hell the moron can't even quote a post correctly and he has a BAD case of Voldemort [tmrepository.com] which you might want to point out next time you slap him around as its soooo funny! Voldemort is where a foaming at the mouth FOSSie can't say the words "Microsoft or MS or MSFT" because they are afraid the boogey man will jump on and get them, so they HAVE to put "M$" or "that other OS'. Its a perfect sign of delusional perse

Sorry I don't serve elves, I hate the little pointy eared fucks and think they should be sent back to the forests, little pointy shoed bastards they are. And if you don't know what he and i are talking about perhaps you should simply stay out of it, yes? because the FOSSie in question actually stalked me for over half a year across the web, all so he could post "die you fat fucker die" over and over AND OVER and the ONLY reason he isn't now is he has this delusion that APK, a guy I've never agreed with on p

Then you obviously have your settings blocking him as he has dumped his account right in the shitter, hence his posting as AC and karma whoring lately. go into your settings and allow negative posts to be seen and i'm sure you'll find them or just look for the dumbasses misquote that he thinks by posting HALF a sentence it proves...well i still haven't figured that part out, that he is too fucking stupid to use copy/paste maybe? Anyway the misquote (which he now uses as a sig) is THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN

I think you mean to say "global private interest".
Because quite frankly they have been doing a great job of keeping the internet where it is and there is no significant reason other than all of the legislature that has been out there to fundamentally kill the internet for everyone but corporations.

Aside from the whole.xxx fiasco, where the only people to register domains in that TLD were people who already owned the.com version and didn't want to see squatters in it. A good rule of thumb for defining a new TLD: Who will buy domain.newtld who wouldn't buy domain.fucksgoats just to stop someone else using it? If this set of people is not the majority, then it's not a worthwhile new TLD, it's just a money grab. The new TLDs failed the fucksgoats test.

.xxx TLD was for porn sites. The porn companies were asking for this, as they don't want children looking at their porn; just like the US government. The porn industry wanted an easy way for filtering companies to filter them out so that there is less accidental porn popping in on normal searches, and for web filters for schools and such.

If non-porn companies are buying up the.xxx domain name of their.com domain name, they are frankly retarded.

The porn industry wasn't asking for this, because there was no incentive for putting porn on.xxx. First, there is no global definition of what constitutes porn (compare Sweden and Saudi Arabia's definitions for extremes, most of the world is somewhere in the middle). Second, if.xxx is filtered then this gives a strong incentive to have a.com domain. If you're ad-supported, then you don't really care if children see the site - as long as there's some kind of 'click here if you're over 18 thing you're c

It also says that no one else met the requirements. If ICANN is in the same boat as everyone else, either everyone isn't on the same page as the NTIA or the NTIA is on the wrong page as everyone else. Sensationalistic headline - perhaps there's some cause for concern about a less transparent organization (like the ITU) replacing ICANN but I don't see how this means ICANN has somehow failed to meet up to "community standards" given that the rest of the global community "failed" too.
Not that I've read the

ICANN has been rolling out TLDs in order to profit its core constituency: the registrars.

Nobody needed.xxx -- except the registrar who pushed it and is now using extortion
tactics to pressure people into buying domains in it, e.g. "get yours...before someone
else does".

Nobody needed.info -- what, domains in other TLDs don't contain "information"?
(Well...alright...spammers needed it, and quickly overran it. It's been a best practice
in anti-spam engineering to block *.info and whitelist what you need for many years.)
But registrars stood to profit, especially from the spammers buying domains by the
thousands, so it was created.

Nobody needed.biz -- because we already had.com. But it was a chance to sell
the same thing twice, always a great business opportunity for registrars, so ICANN
made it happen.

And nobody needs hundreds of additional TLDs, either. There is no clamor of
voices among the billion people on the Internet for.pepsi or.google or.dell.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the majority of domains in existence today
are used for abusive purposes: spam, phishing, typosquatting, search engine
manipulation, etc. Yet ICANN wants to do whatever it can to explode the number,
to keep the cash registers ringing at the registrars.

What ICANN could be doing -- but isn't -- is to reign in the epidemic abuses.
There are registrars that are owned by known spammers, for example. Another
thing it could be tackling are domain confiscations (by the USG) without due
process: ICANN can and should push back hard against that. But none of
this will happen: ICANN is corrupt to the bone, a textbook example of
regulatory capture, therefore it will do whatever maximizes the profits
of its masters.

And nobody needs hundreds of additional TLDs, either. There is no clamor of voices among the billion people on the Internet for.pepsi or.google or.dell.

Dozens or hundreds of additional TLD's are indeed a dumb idea. But thousands is a great idea - it would put an end to squatting and most WIPO domain disputes. Really specific ones like.coop and.museum are a step in this direction. They need to continue with.plumber and.geek.

I have mixed feelings on your proposal. I think the fundamental issue with DNS is that it doesn't scale well.

I hear the objections already. From the technical standpoint of being able to convert names into IPs and other records it scales VERY well indeed - that is its big strength. From the standpoint of being a distributed and maintainable database it also scales well.

However, what is the whole point of DNS? It was intended to make it easy to remember globally-unique host names. That hasn't scaled wel

So, adding many more TLDs could help make the stuff on the left of the dot shorter, but only if you don't allow existing domain holders to get preferential access to the new domains.

Presumably in this proposal, businesses would only be allowed to apply for names under TLDs that match what their business does, much the same as how trademarks work. i.e., until a few years ago, apple.computer would point at Apple Computers and apple.music would point at the record company that made Apple Computers agree that they would never go into the music business. If you have 2 companies after the same name under the same TLD, you have got a trademark dispute (2 companies in the same line of busine

It's not a just a perception that.info has been overrun by spammers, it's a measurement. I've been working in this area for a very long time, and have done extensive number-crunching at the scale of "tens of millions of domains". It's certainly true that there are non-spammer-owned.info domains, but it's also true that spammers buy them BY THE THOUSANDS. (Registrars approve of this, of course; bulk customers are terrific for them. Even better: repeat bulk customers, because spammers who burn through all those domains will be back for more.) Of course, without inventorying all.info domains, I can't give an exact percentage; but based on what I've seen, it looks to me like 97-99% of.info domains are owned by abusers. And whether the "true" number is 98.2 or 99.3 or whatever, it doesn't really matter in a practical sense: blacklisting.info in toto and making exceptions is extremely effective.

> it looks to me like 97-99% of.info domains are owned by abusers. And whether the "true" number is 98.2 or 99.3 or whatever, it doesn't really matter in a practical sense: blacklisting.info in toto and making exceptions is extremely effective.

Google said that 99% of all email is spam. By that measure blocking *.* would be extremely effective, too. (And of course it is.) But is it The Right Thing To Do(TM)?

I strongly disagree. There has never been any need for.info and there is no need for it now. Domains in other TLDs are quite affordable -- provided you only want a few, of course, which is all that any responsible entity needs. Now if you want thousands, it's not -- but in that case, you're an abuser and I don't really care what you think. As for it not being in the USA, please...spare me. If the USG wants to confiscate.info domains, it will. You will not stop it. And as for your so-called "o

So why should we just go ahead and capitulate ownership? I mean, seriously? I'm all for helping out the world and all that, but I'm getting just a little sick and tired of everybody else trying to steal all our stuff.

Well, USA are much less trusted now that they used to be before. USA used to be good guy, now they are "hard to tell" guys. The internet originated in american universities, which are still top of the world. They used to keep it free and nice and internet became important.

But the USA politician and business took over and the friendly period is over. People used to like to have USA in power, now USA in power is a scary proposition.

It is not about stealing your stuff, it is about being afraid that you will st

I am somewhat puzzled by this story. Checking out the IANA's site, looks like they are responsible for coordinating some of the key elements that keep the Internet running smoothly. Whilst the Internet is renowned for being a worldwide network free from central coordination, there is a technical need for some key parts of the Internet to be globally coordinated – and this coordination role is undertaken by IANA.

Aside from the TLDs, the IANA also gets things like Internet Addresses from the IETF, which it then doles out to the various Regional Internet Registries, such as ARIN, APNIC, et al. While these organizations are not subsidiaries, they do get their number resources from IANA, which ensures that resources are properly managed.

So the thing that surprises me is - how does the US government get involved in IANA and various TLDs? The only TLD they should be bothered about is.us. I guess one could make an argument for.com,.org,.net and others, but there too, they are assigned to non-US organizations as well. While the US may have 'invented the internet', its management as a worldwide resource has to be free of any country's government, even if the bulk of that organization's activities happen within that country.

Which is why it puzzles me that the government should be in any way involved in the relationship b/w ICANN and IANA.

The IETF only does standards, not policy, so they don't really have anything to do with this.

Essentially, the root DNS as it is now is only recognized as such because so far, ICANN did a pretty good job with it. Sure there have been some bumps and complaints, and a number of them were valid, but overall, it was Good Enough.

But if the US (or any) government *really* tries to get involved, it's only a matter of time before an alternative is found. Technically, anyone can be The Root. One only needs to get eno

So the thing that surprises me is - how does the US government get involved in IANA and various TLDs? The only TLD they should be bothered about is.us. I guess one could make an argument for.com,.org,.net and others, but there too, they are assigned to non-US organizations as well. While the US may have 'invented the internet', its management as a worldwide resource has to be free of any country's government, even if the bulk of that organization's activities happen within that country.

Which is why it puzzles me that the government should be in any way involved in the relationship b/w ICANN and IANA.

It has always been involved, and there has always been this connection. IANA was set up by Jon Postel under a US Government contract and transferred to ICANN under a US Government contract (the one with the canceled RFP, to be specific).

I understand that that's how it started, but as things evolved and the internet resources became more international, shouldn't things like ICANN, IANA, IETF, et al have become less tied to the US government? I recognize that all these things happened in the US, but as it's spread, it should be something like a consortium setup.

If it was to move, it would have to be determined where it lived. Would you want it under NATO? The UN? Some other country? It is where it is because it always was, with these items there is no reason to change it unless something better comes along.

So far, the US has never abused this. The US has only gone after domain names in the US TLDs (.us,.com,.org,.net,.gov), not other nation's TLDs. If you don't want to fall under US law, then don't have a US TLD. If you run a site for people who like fr

My point is that things like TLDs should be under the RIRs, like ARIN (for.us,.gov - it's still arguable whether.com and.net are US TLDs or not), not under ICANN or IANA. Just like the RIRs issue IP address blocks and autonomous numbers, they can issue these as well, w/ the IANA only getting involved if 2 RIRs happen to be competing for the same TLDs - something unlikely to happen. Things like ICANN or IANA wouldn't be touched b'cos they wouldn't even own the things that the US government is intereste

So since cars were invented in Germany, you would let Germany decide over car manufacturing worldwide? Radio was an Italian invention, should they decide frequency allocations in America? The list goes on.

I wonder if this has to do with the US authority over the Internet. We've already seen.com TLD takeovers, but maybe they want to do it in every country for the RIAA and friends. I have a feeling this is related to some new power grab.

It's about time that the Internet cut it's ties with a government that has shown to have no respect for it's International character. If I had a vote, I'd vote for both ICANN and IANA to be distributed over several well informed, democratic countries that have no real political or economical ties to each other, or to single large other countries. Sure, it's hard to find those, you may have to compromise, but anything is better than to have a corpocracy rule the Internet by yanking domains and deciding what

You may not like the laws in the US, but that doesn't mean you break US laws when in the US. When someone buys a.com domain name, they are submitting to US laws, if you don't like that, don't break US law, or don't use a US TLD.

I suppose now the US will form a shadow imperial government dedicated to it's own dark deeds while publicly displaying a facade of pro-Democracy and anti-Authoritarianism until they amass total power over the world economies. Oh, wait...

Wrong,.com and.net are operated by Verisign under contract by the US Department of Commerce. The US Dept of Commerce assumed control of generic top level domains in 1997. So there ideal purpose might be international domains, make no mistake that they are under the control of the US government.

.com does not belong to the United States. The fact that Verisign was assigned control of the registry by ICANN does not change this. Similarly if ICANN gave the registry to an operator in France it would not mean that France now owns.com.

Since Verisign is a private company it is incorrect to say that the US Government controls.com. Sure they can (and do) abuse the unique position they are in by bullying the registry operator. But to conclude that they control.com is similar to concluding that they control Windows updates, since Microsoft also has its headquarters in the US.

I for one find it deeply concerning that the US is asserting jurisdiction over international domains. Many of which are registered outside of the US by foreign registrants and registrars.

I'd say the problem is more that international media conglomerates are asserting jurisdiction over a US defense network. Sort of like how the time that private corporation tried to assert jurisdiction over US Air Force Space Command GPS spectrum. Oh wait, they're still doing that. Anyway, DARPA never seized anyone's domain, and USAF generals risked their careers to stop LightSquared from breaking your GPS.

If your buds at the MPAA and RIAA didn't get what they wanted here in the colonies for a foreign domain, they'd just get it in that country. Nowhere is safe.

You realize that the Department of Commerce also controls the root DNS zone right? They also allow Verisign to control.com and.net on their behalf (via ICANN)..com and.net are very much under US control.

You realize that the Department of Commerce also controls the root DNS zone right? They also allow Verisign to control.com and.net on their behalf (via ICANN)..com and.net are very much under US control.

The Department of Commerce, via their ownership of the root DNS zone, also allow SWITCH to control.ch (the ccTLD for Switzerland) on their behalf (via ICANN). Does that make.ch under US control?.com/.net/.org are not US domains anymore than.ch is a US domain.

.com does not belong to the United States. The fact that Verisign was assigned control of the registry by ICANN does not change this. Similarly if ICANN gave the registry to an operator in France it would not mean that France now owns.com.

Since Verisign is a private company it is incorrect to say that the US Government controls.com. Sure they can (and do) abuse the unique position they are in by bullying the registry operator. But to conclude that they control.com is similar to concluding that they control Windows updates, since Microsoft also has its headquarters in the US.

I for one find it deeply concerning that the US is asserting jurisdiction over international domains. Many of which are registered outside of the US by foreign registrants and registrars.

Exactly. The whole MegaUpload farce shows how much the US flat out abuses the fact that the current controller of.com is a US based company.

It should be the obvious that VeriSign has failed and their control needs to be revoked ASAP. Under no circumstances should a country be able to steal domains by simply abusing the geographical location of the current administrative company. And yes, they are stealing them. The owner has lost control and they are now used to point to propaganda pages owned by the US go

If you don't want to follow the laws of the US, don't use.com, use the country that has the laws you agree with. Would you be screaming if MegaUpload was hosted in the US and the servers were confiscated? Why do you think it is any different for MegaUpload.com domain name than it would be for their physical servers? It is a fact that Verisign has offices in the US, therefore it has to do what US law says.

"Speculation is that this is related to the attempts of the ITU-T to take over Internet governance"

I'm not sure who with a modicum of knowledge would speculate that, given that the ITU and ICANN are utterly separate bodies and don't like each other very much. Not re-signing with ICANN is not going to annoy the ITU at all.

"Apple Inc. plans to create a $304 million campus in Austin, Texas, which will add 3,600 jobs over the next decade, more than doubling its labourforce in the city. The Cupertino, California, customer device huge already employs thousands in Austin, whose tasks include handling customer issues and support."

ICANN: Okay, we've been thinking about it and it's hard to see what's wrong with a XXX domain - at worst we still get porn everywhere on the internet, like we already have, and at best some of it's a bit more centralised where people can filter it.

First,.xxx solves absolutely no problems. It will not make porn easier to filter (why use.xxx if everyone is filtering it?). Arguments about specific TLDs aside, I seriously doubt that.xxx in particular has much to with this situation. Rather,.xxx is a symptom of a larger problem.

ICANN has stopped working to serve the public's interests. The proliferation of new TLDs, including.xxx, has been brought about for a single purpose: to make registrars more money. With.xxx its been nothing but a blatant extortion campaign against large companies -- "register, or else". If the goal of this direction is to fundamentally change the hierarchical nature of DNS (say, to move from www.microsoft.com and yro.slashdot.org to www.microsoft and yro.slashdot), then that is probably a good idea in the long run, but the way in which they're going about it is nothing more than a money grab.

Put simply, ICANN has stopped working for a better and more stable public Internet and has instead taken a dive directly into the registrars pockets. I personally would like nothing more than to see the US stick it to ICANN if it will help put them back on the right track (or work towards their outright replacement).

Put simply, ICANN has stopped working for a better and more stable public Internet and has instead taken a dive directly into the registrars pockets. I personally would like nothing more than to see the US stick it to ICANN if it will help put them back on the right track (or work towards their outright replacement).

The only flaw I can see in this reasoning, is that the US government has not shown any evidence that it wants "a better and more stable public Internet", at least not when there is any conflict between that and doing the bidding of the corporations who, ultimately, fill every politician's campaign coffers. Or conflict with repressing their political bête noire of the week.

I'm not suggesting this was majority opinion, but my understanding was some companies in the porn industry did want.xxx so that it could be filtered. Not all of the porn companies are douches, I believe some help companies that make filtering software because they agree children shouldn't be accessing that content.

> The proliferation of new TLDs, including.xxx, has been brought about for a single purpose: to make registrars more money.

The basic idea of.xxx is sound, it follows the idea of a topical structure. It is in line with.biz,.info etc, which are working well, even if not tremendously popular.

But the handling was shameful, that's true. They even charged (serious money) if you wanted to prevent your name from being used on.xxx - which by all means should be a free or at least nearly free service.

No, at worst you have people spending millions of dollars to pay for domains that they don't need or want, but have to get for defensive purposes. The XXX domain is bad porn sites (since it leads the way to further censorship), it is bad for the fundies (since it does not involve sticking their head in the sand), and it is bad for all other corporations (because they have to buy domians for defensive purposes). The only people who benefit from having more generic TLDs are the registrars who will rake in tons of cash selling them.

Given the widespread annotation of xxx I don't see why people should think lego.dk and lego.xxx would be the same company or why lego.xxx would be bad reputation for lego.dk.

Unless lego.xxx somehow claims to be a site for Lego(tm) porn, and then the company can hit them
with defamation, trademark violation, or whatever it's called. They don't need to own lego.xxx for that.

I don't think you know much about the Puritans, they drank, had tonnes of sex and dressed in bright colours. What they did not do was get drunk, have sex with people they were not married to or dress like emos.